Inn
was sufficient excuse for this following up of his brother's footsteps.
It was one of those waifs and strays of rather disreputable business
which the elder man sometimes threw in the way of the younger.

As the wheel of the hansom ground against the kerbstone in front of the
telegraph office, the figure of George Sheldon vanished in a little
court to the left of that establishment. Instead of pursuing this
receding figure, Philip Sheldon walked straight into the office.

It was empty. There was no one in any of the shaded compartments, so
painfully suggestive of pecuniary distress and the stealthy
hypothecation of portable property. A sound of rattling and bumping in
an inner office betrayed the neighbourhood of a clerk; but in the
office Mr. Sheldon was alone.

Upon the blotting-pad on the counter of the central partition the
stockbroker perceived one great blot of ink, still moist. Ha laid the
tip of his square forefinger upon it, to assure himself of that fact,
and then set himself deliberately to scrutinise the blotting-paper. He
was a man who seldom hesitated. His greatest _coups_ on the
money-market had been in a great measure the result of this faculty of
prompt decision. To-day he possessed himself of the blotting-pad, and
examined the half-formed syllables stamped upon it with as much
coolness and self-possession as if he had been seated in his own office
reading his own newspaper. A man given to hesitation would have looked
to the right and the left and watched for his opportunity--and lost it.
Philip Sheldon knew better than to waste his chances by needless
precaution; and he made himself master of all the intelligence the
blotting-pad could afford him before the clerk emerged from the inner
den where the rattling and stamping was going forward.

"I thought as much," muttered the stockbroker, as he recognised traces
of his brother's sprawling penmanship upon the pad. The message had
been written with a heavy hand and a spongy quill pen, and had left a
tolerably clear impression of its contents on the blotting-paper.

Here and there the words stood out bold and clear; here and there,
again, there was only one decipherable letter amongst a few broken
hieroglyphics. Mr. Sheldon was accustomed to the examination of very
illegible documents, and he was able to master the substance of that
random impression. If he could not decipher the whole, he made out
sufficient for his purpose. Money was to be offer